Best Food Writing 2011

by Holly Hughes

  Finally, just to make sure we’ve had enough to eat, Masiol brings a gorgeous fritto misto. He has prepared it with moleche and lots of scampi, the emblematic Adriatic crayfish—actually a tiny lobster (and nothing to do, incidentally, with the garlicky shrimp dish that’s popular in Italian-American restaurants)—as well as thin bits of zucchini, onion, eggplant, sweet pepper and carrot. “Lele buys at least half of his seafood from retired fishermen who bring back just a little of this and a little of that,” says Bepi as we finish. “That’s why he has some of the best in Venice.”

  I didn’t know it at the time, but as we were enjoying this excellent repast, the Giudecca canal, in the heart of Venice, was clogged with fishing boats (an estimated 200 of them) protesting the Italian government’s implementation of new European Union fishing rules. These would, among other things, mandate the use of nets with mesh large enough to let most of what Bepi and I ate at Busa Alla Torre slip through.

  It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that in Venetian cuisine, everything comes from the sea. In this case, “sea” means the Mediterranean in general and the Adriatic in particular, but especially the salty expanses of the Venetian lagoon—a vast wetland, one of the largest in the Mediterranean basin, covering about 136,000 acres of mudflats, salt marshes and open water. Several of the islands in this lagoon yield vegetables of extraordinary quality, and its tidal fringes harbor wild ducks and other game birds that are an important part of traditional Venetian cooking. But the real bounty is the breathtaking array of top-quality fish, shellfish and cephalopods (squid, octopus and the like), some of them found only here.

  Seafood comes to the city primarily through the Mercato Ittico all’ingrosso del Tronchetto, the big wholesale fish market near the Piazzale Roma (where the city’s bus depot and parking garage complexes are located). Fluorescent-lit, with aisles of wet floors lined with crates and Styrofoam boxes full of fish and shellfish of every description, it isn’t a very romantic place. Seafood of the highest quality is sold there, but because local waters produce nowhere near enough to supply the city’s needs, much of what’s on offer is frozen, and a lot of it comes not from the Mediterranean but from the Atlantic and the Pacific. A few years ago, in fact, the market issued a statement estimating that only around 20 percent of the seafood sold there was local. I’ve heard estimates that it’s probably closer to 10 percent.

  Because the Tronchetto facility feeds the more famous and infinitely more picturesque Venice fish market near the Rialto Bridge—officially the Mercato del Pesce al Minuto, or Retail Fish Market—a fair amount of what’s sold there is frozen and/or foreign, too. Strolling through the market’s open-sided, Gothic-style pavilions (open Tuesday through Saturday) early last summer, I thought it looked like maybe 35 or 40 percent of the seafood was local—at least gauging by the proudly displayed labels marked Nostrani, meaning “Ours.”

  Here is some of what I saw, in addition to the Sicilian swordfish and tuna and Scottish salmon: moleche, scampi, calamaretti (small squid), mazzancolle (tiger prawns), canestrelli (bay scallops), peoci (little thick-bearded mussels), bovoletti (tiny sea snails that are boiled, then dressed with olive oil, garlic and parsley), and three types of octopus—tiny folpetti, larger moscardini (with bodies about the size of golf balls) and piovre, which are three or four times larger still. There was also seppie grosse (large cuttlefish), seppie tenerissime (“very tender” smaller cuttlefish), orata (gilthead bream), coda di rospo (monkfish tail), razza (ray), San Pietro (John Dory), triglia (red mullet), solioglia (sole) and passerini (literally “little sparrows,” but a kind of small lagoon sole that is typically dredged in flour and fried).

  At least some of this, I realized, might not be here the next time I visit.

  “When I read about the new fishing regulations,” says Luca di Vita, “I saw five of my best-selling dishes disappear.” Di Vita and chef Bruno Gavagnin run Alle Testiere, a 22-seat urban osteria near the lively Campo Santa Maria Formosa that happens to serve some of the best seafood in Venice and not much else. Restaurants often bring you the menu plus a “fresh sheet,” listing the fish brought in that day. At Alle Testiere, the fresh sheet is the menu. On the day I visit, the small selection of dishes includes a shrimp and raw asparagus salad, spaghetti with bevarasse clams and four or five kinds of simple grilled fish. I order three of Alle Testiere’s classics: bay scallops on the half shell with wisps of orange and onion; remarkable gnocchetti (small gnocchi) with zotoeti, the tiniest squid you can imagine, in a sauce improbably but deliciously accented with cinnamon; and salty-fresh prawns alla busara, in a slightly spicy sweet-and-sour tomato sauce.

  After lunch, di Vita sits down to talk about Venetian seafood and the new fishing regulations. “Look,” he says, “the Adriatic isn’t deep—maybe 35 meters [115 feet] at most—and shallower water means smaller fish and shellfish. The things we fish aren’t babies; they’re actually full-grown. They don’t get any bigger. The new laws are perfect for the southern Mediterranean, but not for here. These little creatures are our treasure, the base of our cuisine.” Alle Testiere gets a lot of its fish not from Tronchetto or the Rialto market but from Chioggia, the fishermen’s port at the southern end of the lagoon. “A lot of restaurants here have survived the financial crisis by buying cheaper fish—frozen and imported,” says di Vita. “For us, this isn’t an option. Either you choose to work with fresh fish every day or you don’t. We do.”

  Another restaurant that does is Al Covo, whose proprietor, Cesare Benelli, has been known to post his daily bills in the window so anyone can see when and where he bought the local seafood he’s serving. A warm, charming place off the Riva degli Schiavoni near the Arsenale, Venice’s medieval shipyard and armory, Al Covo serves traditional Venetian dishes with subtle modern touches. The marinated fresh anchovies with eggplant and the black spaghetti (colored with cuttlefish ink) with scampi, confit cherry tomatoes and wild fennel are irresistible. The bigoli (thick whole-wheat spaghetti) in a sauce of anchovies and onions is about as perfect an interpretation of this Venetian standby as you’ll find anywhere. To me, though, Benelli’s greatest triumph is his fried seafood. In late spring and autumn, he prepares moleche with strings of red onion and matchstick potatoes—fish-and-chips as I suspect must be served in heaven. And year-round he produces a simple classic fritto misto, which at the very least will include scampi, calamari and bay scallops along with zucchini, onions and usually another vegetable or two, but will often contain whatever other little fish or crustacean Benelli has bought that day. Whatever’s in it, it will be fresh, crisp and perfect.

  Venetian seafood, particularly the small stuff, lends itself very nicely to cicchetti (sometimes spelled cichetti), the bar snacks that are often called Venetian tapas. These are served mostly in small, lively establishments called bacari, though the line between a bacaro and an osteria is not very well defined. The oldest bacaro/osteria in Venice is Do Spade (Two Swords), dating back to 1488. One of the newer places, where Bepi and I end up one evening, is Ostaria al Garanghelo, opened in 2003 (and not to be confused with Osteria al Garanghelo, on Via Garibaldi). The paper placemats on the tables in this long, wood-paneled room—which includes, unusually for Venice, a high communal table with 18 stools around it—are printed with Venetian sayings. One is In ostaria no vago ma co ghe so ghestago (I don’t go to the osteria, but when I do go, I stay), an easy sentiment to understand at a place like this. My Venetian-Italian dictionary defines garanghelo as baldoria, which means revelry or merrymaking. Bepi says the word also implies a casual meeting with friends.

  Chef Renato Osto, also a co-owner of al Garanghelo, doesn’t tamper with tradition. His food is simply, unapologetically Venetian, which is not to say it lacks inspiration. His baccalà mantecato is very creamy and almost elegant—so smoothly beaten, cracks Bepi, that “it’s made with more elbow grease than olive oil”—while his sardines in saor seem especially pure, the onions soft but still white instead of caramelized brown, with no sign of pine nuts or raisins.
The tomato sauce in which his octopus swims, on the other hand, is dense and intensely flavored. Osto also has a long menu of risotto and spaghetti dishes, many of them piscatorial in nature. His risotto with scampi and porcini—“a kind of surf and turf,” Bepi calls it—is positively decadent. If you order his spaghetti alla busara with scampi and jumbo shrimp, the waiter will bring you a bib; you’ll need it as you slurp up every last bite.

  Of course, there are a number of places in Venice where you can have first-rate seafood in grander settings, if that’s what you’re after. Do Forni (Two Ovens), just off the Piazza San Marco, for one, is a handsome, old-fashioned ristorante with tuxedo-clad captains, serving carts, hotel silver and dressed-up Venetians out for a night on the town, all under the watchful eye of Eligio Paties, an old-school professional who’s been in charge since 1973. More than half the menu here is seafood, and the specialty of the house is a gloriously simple dish of lightly poached scampi and large scallops on a bed of arugula and a sauce made of nothing more than olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper. I sample two varieties of fritto misto, one with little croquettes of baccalà mantecato, miniature sardines, squares of mozzarella and thin wedges of eggplant, and the other with moleche and oversize scampi. Next comes a particularly fine-grained version of the classic risotto nero, full of cuttlefish and its ink, followed by an attractively straightforward grilled Adriatic sole with lemon butter. It is all immensely satisfying, and it occurs to me as I finish that if I lived in Venice, I might never eat meat again.

  The next morning I’m awakened by a chorus of dissonant horns. Looking out my window, down to the canals, I see the fishing boats are back for another day of protests, zigzagging among the vaporetti and water taxis and gondolas. I’m as much of a conservationist as any sensible person in the 21st century, and I’m sure the EU regulations weren’t imposed without good reason. At the same time I feel sympathy for the fishermen, whom I suspect fear losing not only their livelihoods but their very identities. There’s a possibility that the Italian government will be able to negotiate some exceptions for traditional fishing practices; there’s also a possibility that Venetians won’t pay any more attention to the new rules than Parisians do to the smoking ban in cafés.

  I hope something works out. Catching and selling and cooking and eating the abundance of the lagoon has shaped Venetian life for as long as there have been Venetians. Here, in this city built on and defined by water, far more than lunch and dinner comes from the sea.

  WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED

  By Jessica B. Harris

  From High on the Hog

  Journalist, professor, and cookbook author Jessica B. Harris has chronicled the culinary traditions of the African diaspora for 30-plus years, long before “foodways” became a catchphrase. In High on the Hog, she braids together all the strands of this rich heritage.

  Soul food has been defined as the traditional African American food of the South as it has been served in black homes and restaurants around the country, but there is wide-ranging disagreement on exactly what that food was. Was it solely the food of the plantation South that was fed to the enslaved: a diet of hog and hominy supplemented with whatever could be hunted or foraged or stolen to relieve its monotony? Was it the traditionally less-noble parts of the pig that were fed to the enslaved, like the chitterlings and hog maws and pigs’ feet, the taste for which had been carried to the North by those who left the South in search of jobs? Was it the foods that nourished those who danced at rent parties in Harlem and who went to work in the armament factories during World War II? Was it the fried chicken that was served by the waiter-carriers who hawked their wares at train stations in Virginia or the chicken that was packed in boxes and nourished those who migrated to Kansas and other parts of the West? Was it the smothered pork chop that turned up in the African American restaurants covered in rich brown gravy or the fluffy cornbread that accompanied it?

  Soul food, it would seem, depends on an ineffable quality. It is a combination of nostalgia for and pride in the food of those who came before. In the manner of the Negro spiritual “How I Got Over,” soul food looks back at the past and celebrates a genuine taste palate while offering more than a nod to the history of disenfranchisement of blacks in the United States. In the 1960s, as the history of African Americans began to be rewritten with pride instead of with the shame that had previously accompanied the experience of disenfranchisement and enslavement, soul food was as much an affirmation as a diet. Eating neckbones and chitterlings, turnip greens and fried chicken, became a political statement for many, and African American restaurants that had existed since the early part of the century were increasingly being patronized not only by blacks but also by those in sympathy with the movement. In the North, those who patronized soul food restaurants also included homesick white Southerners as well as the occasional white liberal who wanted a taste of some of the foods from below the Mason-Dixon Line.

  As had often been the case in African American society, there was a culinary class divide that must be acknowledged. At one pole were those whose social aspirations led them to eat dishes that emulated the dietary habits of mainstream America and Europe. At the other were those who consumed what was a more traditional African American diet: one that harked back to the slave foods of the South. In the 1960s, soul food based on the slave diet of hog and hominy became a political statement and was embraced by many middle-class blacks who had previously publicly eschewed it as a relic of a slave past. It became popular and even celebrated.

  A look at the cookbooks of the period confirms the enormous impact that the term had on the minds and indeed the palates of many. Most African American cookbooks published prior to the 1960s and in the early part of the decade referenced the plantation South or the historic aspect of the recipes with titles like Plantation Recipes, The Melrose Plantation Cookbook (to which folk artist Clementine Hunter made numerous contributions), and the National Council of Negro Women’s Historical Cookbook of the American Negro. Others invoked the name of a well-known local cook or caterer, like Bess Grant’s Cook Book, published in Culver City, California, and Lena Richard’s eponymous cookbook, published in New Orleans, Louisiana. The trend continued through the early 1960s, with such works as His Finest Party Recipes Based on a Lifetime of Successful Catering, by Frank Bellamy of Roswell, Georgia, and A Good Heart and a Light Hand: Ruth L. Gaskins’ Collection of Traditional Negro Recipes, published in Annandale, Virginia.

  By the late 1960s and early 1970s, soul food had gained a powerful allure, and a tidal wave of cookbooks with “soul food” in the title was unleashed, including Bob Jeffries’s Soul Food Cookbook, Hattie Rinehart Griffin’s Soul-Food Cookbook, and Jim Harwood and Ed Callahan’s Soul Food Cookbook—all published in 1969. The same year also saw the publication of Princess Pamela’s Soul Food Cookbook, by the owner of an East Village restaurant in New York City that had become a mecca for whites who wanted a taste of “authentic” African American cooking.

  If the period of the Civil Rights Movement began with traditional African American cookbooks extolling the virtues of greens, macaroni and cheese, neckbones, chitterlings, and fried chicken, it ended with a transformation of the diet of many African Americans. By the end of the decade and throughout the 1970s, brown rice, smoked turkey wings, tahini, and tofu also appeared on urban African American tables as signs of gastronomic protest against the traditional diet and its perceived limitations to health and well-being, both real or imagined. One of the reasons was the resurgence of the Nation of Islam.

  The Nation of Islam (NOI) originated in the early part of the twentieth century but came to national prominence in the 1960s under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad, who preached that peaceful confrontation was not the only way. In Chicago, Detroit, and other large urban areas, the Nation of Islam offered an alternative to the Civil Rights Movement’s civil disobedience, which many felt was unnecessarily docile. It preached an Afro-centric variation of traditional Islam and provided a family-centered cu
lture in which gender roles were clearly defined. Food always played an important role in the work of the Nation. As early as 1945, the NOI had recognized the need for land ownership and also for economic independence and had purchased 145 acres in Michigan. Two years later, it opened a grocery store, a restaurant, and a bakery in Chicago. One of the major tenets of this religion was the eschewing of the behaviors that had been imposed by whites, who were regarded as “blue-eyed devils.” Followers abjured their “slave name,” frequently taking an X in its place and adopted a strictly regimented way of life that included giving up eating the traditional foods that were fed to the enslaved in the South.

  NOI leader Elijah Muhammad was extremely concerned about the dietary habits of African Americans and in 1967 published a dietary manual for his followers titled How to Eat to Live; in 1972 he published another, How to Eat to Live, Book 2. As with much about the Nation of Islam, there is considerable contention about Muhammad’s ideas and precepts, which are a combination of traditional Islamic proscriptions with an idiosyncratic admixture of prohibitions that seem personally biased. He vehemently opposed the traditional African American diet, or “slave diet,” as he called it. Alcohol and tobacco were forbidden to Nation of Islam members and pork, in particular, was anathema. Elijah Muhammad enjoined his followers: